


Fic Exchange

by taylor_tut



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Concussions, Head Injury, Hospitals, Hurt Richie Tozier, Injury, Sickfic, Spoilers, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 04:57:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21386473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: This is a fic exchange for a friend on tumblr! their prompt was for Richie getting a concussion from falling after getting caught in the Deadlights.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 149





	Fic Exchange

When Richie came down from the Deadlights’ grasp, it was hard and fast and right on his back. The crack of his head hitting the stone floor beneath him was enough to have the others wincing even when there was so much else going on, and Eddie felt panic churn his stomach. He was taking off running before he had a chance to think about how scared he was. 

“Richie!” he cried, dropping to his knees beside him. He shouldn’t move him, he thought: if he had a neck or spinal cord injury, moving him would make it worse, could even kill him, if they were unlucky, and the Losers as an entity had never been anything in their whole lives but unlucky. 

But suddenly, an enormous claw, bigger than a bus, bigger than anything he’d ever seen, was hurtling toward both of them and it was Ben knocking them both out of the way, shoving Eddie to the ground and sending Richie rolling a few feet down the declining terrain toward a shallow pool of water, that kept that claw out of his torso. 

“Grab him!” Ben demanded, scooping Richie up under one arm and gesturing for Eddie to take the other. Well, if they didn’t move, he supposed, Richie was dead either way, so really, he had no choice but to obey. Richie was limp in his arms and his head lolled forward into his chest as they ran. He tried not to focus on the blood in his hair. 

With the help of the others, Eddie and Ben managed to get Richie into a small enough crevice in the canal that Pennywise couldn’t follow, and although the silence was possibly more tense and offputting than being chased by the fucking thing, he was grateful for the chance to look over Richie. 

Ben was tapping the side of his face in a way that brought back an ill-timed memory—a time when they were all 16 and Richie had come to school with the flu and managed to push through the whole day only to pass out next to his bike as they got ready to go home. They’d panicked, none of them so much as Eddie, and Ben and Bev had knelt down beside him, Ben tapping his burning cheek lightly, cursing the whole time, while Bev had poured water from a bottle onto her sleeve and begun to wipe gently at his forehead. Just when they’d thought they were going to have to go inside and get the nurse, Bill had gotten him to come back around by—

“Hey, Trashmouth,” Bill shouted, dragging Eddie out of the memory by quoting it directly, slapping him hard once across the face as he did so, “rise and shine.” Just as they had that day, Richie’s eyes snapped open and darted nervously around the room for a single moment before seeming to remember where he was. 

“Jesus, Bill,” Bev chastized, “he’s already hurt. Give him a minute.” 

“You okay?” Ben asked Richie, who shut his eyes as he nodded. 

“Wha’appened?” he asked. His words were slurring in a way that made Eddie think that he was decidedly  _ NOT  _ okay. 

“You fell,” Eddie supplied. “Hard.”

“M’hurt?” he verified, as if the grimace of pain in his face and the blood dripping down his neck weren’t proof enough and he needed some kind of external validation, permission to let himself believe it. 

“Yeah, buddy,” Bill replied, “you’re h-h-hurt.” 

“You’re okay, though,” Mike probably hoped more than believed. Under the glares of the rest of the group, he caved. “We can get him to a hospital later. Right now, he’s conscious, and that’s all we need.” 

For the rest of the fight, Richie was quiet when he was conscious and conscious less and less. He leaned heavily against Ben or Mike and even Beverly at one point, because when he was left to his own devices, he was dizzy, staggering around aimlessly citing doubling vision and an intense spinning sensation. It was a textbook concussion, Eddie knew, but Mike was right—if he was able to be up and about, then it couldn’t be too severe. People with severe concussions fell unconscious and couldn’t be roused, they slipped into comas, they died. Richie was just a little loopy, had a bit of a headache. He’d be okay until they beat this thing. 

As they emerged from the cave after It had deflated into nothingness, Eddie couldn’t help but laugh. It was a relieved sort of laugh that bubbled up from a feeling he couldn’t really place, one which made his head feel like it was filled with poprocks despite that his body was heavy with exhaustion, and as he giggled, he heard the others doing the same. Some of the Losers were laughing, some were shouting and whooping, all sounding choked and conflicted and sore. The smile on his face was so big that it practically hurt when it fell all at once as he watched Richie, looking far worse in the sunlight than he had in the drab cave, stumble forward, nearly bowling over Beverly and Ben, before twisting to the side and collapsing into the dirt. Ben reached forward to grab him too late to break his fall and suddenly everyone was sobered from the adrenaline high, realizing that they were not out of danger just yet. 

“Richie,” Eddie called, “Jesus. Somebody call an ambulance.”

“There’s no cell service up here,” Mike replied, apparently already halfway through the same thought. 

“It’ll be faster just to get him back to the car and drive him to the ER,” Beverly mused. “Is it his head?” 

Eddie rolled Richie onto his side to get a better look at the wound and tried to quell the panic that started to constrict his chest at the large, bloody gash at the back of his head. 

“It’ll be a miracle if that’s not a skull fracture,” he muttered. “Come on, Rich. Open your eyes. We’ve gotta get you out of here.”

Richie stirred, closed his hand around Eddie’s when Eddie grabbed it gently, but didn’t wake completely, not for the entire time that Bill and Ben carried him to the car (which he would have had a field day with had he been conscious), nor for the car ride to the hospital, not for the CT scan that revealed a concussion that might have killed him if they’d waited another hour. The entire group, private lives outside of Derry forgotten for the moment, sat quietly in the waiting room, dirty and sweaty and anxious and exhausted, until a nurse came to retrieve them, saying that Richie was awake, if confused, and well enough for one visitor. All eyes had gone to Eddie, who’d stood silently and followed her to a hospital room where Richie lay in the bed. The blood had been cleaned from his neck and shoulders, and he had thick bandages around his head to cover the stitches and staples. He was sitting up in bed and staring dazedly at his own hands gripping the sheets, but looked up when Eddie cleared his throat. 

“Eds,” he gushed, a wide, practically delirious smile splitting his face. “I missed you!” 

Eddie had to bite down on a smile himself. “Yeah? You sound like they gave you the good pain meds,” he said, “and don’t call me ‘Eds.’”    
Richie tapped his IV as if he were prepping his veins to shoot up heroin. “This stuff is great. I feel great.”

At that, Eddie hesitated. “You’re sure?” he asked. Richie nodded for much longer than a sober person would. “Good. When you fell like that—God, you fell so HARD, and then we had to drag you all around the canal… so I thought you were okay, because you weren’t complaining about it, but then you collapsed. It scared the hell out of me.” 

Richie ushered him over and took his hand, a gesture he didn’t pull away from and didn’t want to. Eddie was in the worst place he could think of with the person who’d done nothing but give him relentless hell since he was a child, but for some reason, the touch didn’t bother him one bit. 

“I’m okay, Eddie,” he reassured. He squinted like he was trying to look through cloudy glass. “You okay?” 

Eddie let out a high-pitched, almost desperate, definitely-angry-but-unsure-as-to-why laugh. “Me? Fucking dandy, Richie. I’m fine. You’re the one who almost died.” 

Richie squeezed his hand. “But I didn’t.”

He let himself smile just a little. “Yeah,” he agreed, “you didn’t.” He gestured to a chair in the corner of the room. “Mind if I stay a bit?” 

Richie’s eyes were drooping like he was falling asleep and this was already longer than Eddie had really planned on staying and he’d said more than he’d planned to say. 

“I might fall asleep on you,” Richie warned. “Drugged to the goddamn gills.” 

Eddie shrugged. “I don’t mind.” In truth, he’d like to watch Richie sleep, just a little, maybe watch him wake up once more just to ensure that the next time he closed his eyes wouldn’t be the last. He hadn’t gotten to watch him wake up after collapsing, after all, and there was a sense of closure that he felt he needed from that. He needed to see how much pain he was in once the morphine drip was weaned off and eventually stopped, to see how much of that far-off look and the short, choppy speech patterns faded as the head injury healed. He needed to make sure that he was going to be okay for the long-run, and he found himself not caring how long that might take. 

“You get some rest, too, Eds,” Richie instructed, and Eddie nodded, because he would. Just as soon as Richie did. 

“Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be here when you wake up.” 

In that hospital chair, Eddie got the first nightmare-free sleep he’d had in almost 30 years. 


End file.
